Bmpmod1
Bitmap Modifier 1
Having been frustrated by the limited functionality with Microsoft Paint and Photo Editor,
I wrote an application to modify bitmaps as I needed.
Bmpmod1 can do the following:
| Save as 256 colour palette bitmap | When trying to create gifs both MS_Paint and MS_Photo_Editor use a default palette of colours that are not the colours in your picture, so the gif looks poor. If you create a 256 colour bitmap, where the palette of 256 colours is specific to your bitmap first then you get a good looking gif. Unfortunately both MS_Paint and MS_PE also use the default palette when creating 256 colour bitmaps! However if you use Bmpmod1 to create the 256-colour bitmap with a custom palette first then PS_Paint and MS_PE can use this (properly) to create the gif. |
| Convert 24 bit colour bitmap to an icon | I wanted to create true colour 32*32 pixel icons. Simply create the picture you want as a 24 bit bitmap and use bmpmod1 to convert it to an icon (hours of endless fun turning your friends faces into icons). |
| Count Colours | Counts the number of different colours in the bitmap. This is especially useful when preparing to create a gif (which is limited to 256 colours). |
| Add a (selectable) number of bits of Jitter to each pixel | Pixels are 8 bits but sometimes a picture will look more realistic if an area is not all perfectly the same flat colour. |
| Reduce to 1/3 size | In order to avoid 'Jaggies' you want to reduce a bitmap by an even ratio. Most applications permit this to be entered as a %, so for 1/2 you enter 50%, for 1/4 25% but you can't enter 33.333333333%. Using 33% causes jaggies. I often wanted to reduce pictures by exactly 1/3. |
| Replace one colour with another | This allows you to replace all the instances of one specified RGB (Red, Green and Blue) with another one. While you can do this within MS_Paint using the right-click-erase it takes far too long to sweep an entire picture and you risk missing pixels. |
| Twist Colours | For the entire image you twist the colours so Red becomes Green, Green becomes Blue and Blue becomes Red. This can produce some dramatic effects. |
Some examples
Lets take a picture (The Di'Mul_Jar Map from Conquest), shrink it by 1/3, and convert to a gif (or in the case of BmpMod1 convert to a 256-colour bitmap and then use paint to convert this to a gif).
| MS_Paint | MS_PhotoEditor | BmpMod1 |
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| Paint does a very poor job. The background colour of the sea is nothing like what the original bitmap is. The borders between territories are spotty (as paint throws away pixels rather than averaging whenever it shrinks). You have no hope of reading the numbers in the top left corner. | PhotoEditor has done a 'better' job of keeping the original sea colour by dithering between a number of colours close to the correct one, but this still looks bad and it's not even consistent dithering. The borders are better than MS_Paint but are still missing bits and are blocky in places. You can nearly read the numbers in the top left corner. | There has been some loss of colour, but it's very hard to see. You can even read the numbers in the top left corner (albeit with a little difficulty, but that's due to them being shrunk to 1/3 of their original size). |
BmpMod1 runs in a MS-DOS box or Command prompt and so is compatible with all of W95/W98/Me/NT/W2000/Xp
Purchase BitMap1 here for only $10 (USD)
$10 is about £6 or €8
BmpMod1 is provided along with the data file and licence information in a zip file at ~36kb
I wanted to be contactable at BoxZone_Author@hotmail.com
but hotmail prohibits the use of the word 'zone' to I had to use 'BoxZne_Author' instead